WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 28, 2019
Baker City, Oregon
4A
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news@bakercityherald.com
EDITORIAL
Journalism,
questions
and ‘crime’
Journalists can be annoying.
Might as well concede that from the start.
We ask questions that people sometimes would
prefer not to answer.
Often these people work for the government or
otherwise receive public dollars.
But the notion that querying public offi cials could
even conceivably constitute a crime is so antitheti-
cal to America’s commitment to constitutionally
enshrined press freedom that a reasonable person
might well assume it’s part of a fi ctional plot rather
than reality.
Not so in Malheur County.
The county’s attorney, Stephanie Williams, recently
asked Malheur Sheriff Brian Wolfe to determine
whether phone calls and emails from journalists at
the Malheur Enterprise in Vale to economic develop-
ment offi cials, contacts that happened outside regu-
lar business hours, could meet the legal defi nition of
harassment.
Wolfe told The Associated Press that neither the
calls nor the emails “comes close” to a crime.
This hardly qualifi es as a relief.
Of course it’s not a crime for a journalist to phone
or email a public offi cial.
And it’s equally obvious that the First Amendment
is silent on the matter of regular business hours.
Williams’ request that Wolfe investigate journal-
ists’ legitimate work is obnoxious on its face. But the
episode is even more perplexing, and troubling, be-
cause the Enterprise’s efforts to get comments from
Greg Smith, who contracts with Malheur County for
economic development work (and until July 1 had
a similar contract with Baker County), were such a
fundamental, even banal, part of responsible journal-
ism.
This wasn’t a case of photographers and videogra-
phers congregating on the sidewalk in front of some
embattled politician’s home.
That’s equally protected under the U.S. Constitu-
tion, to be sure.
But it’s likely that most people, were they told that
a sheriff had checked up on journalists’ activities,
would imagine some sort of high-profi le melee rather
than a reporter making phone calls and sending
emails seeking comment on a pending story.
It seems improbable that the Malheur County
fi asco will embolden government offi cials elsewhere
to follow Williams’ lead.
Whatever their feelings about journalists, they
should be familiar enough with the First Amend-
ment to recognize that siccing a sheriff on a newspa-
per not only is futile, but that it also comes closer to
harassment than asking questions does.
— Jayson Jacoby, Baker City Herald editor
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Mail: To the Editor, Baker City Herald,
P.O. Box 807, Baker City, OR 97814
Email: news@bakercityherald.com
Bulletin purchase an opportunity
When Heidi Wright called me June
3 to suggest that our company should
take a look at bidding on Bend’s daily
newspaper, The Bulletin, I was at once
startled, skeptical and intrigued.
We hired Heidi as our chief operating
offi cer in June 2017 — away from The
Bulletin, where she had been the chief
fi nancial offi cer of its parent company,
Western Communications. At that
point, we had just bid on two other
newspapers out of Wescom’s bankrupt-
cy in Baker City and La Grande.
Pursuing the Bulletin prospect, the
board of EO Media Group convened
two impromptu meetings. For the fi rst
of these sessions, at the Sheraton Port-
land Airport Hotel, we invited Daily As-
torian Publisher Kari Borgen, who had
also worked within Western Communi-
cations. Asked what she thought of the
opportunity, Kari said: “It’s exciting and
it’s scary.” That typifi ed our delibera-
tions, during which we probed the risks
and assessed the promise.
My daughter, Susan Forrester Rana,
fl ew up from Oakland for our second
board meeting, during which we set our
top bid for The Bulletin. By this time
my cousin, Kathryn Brown, had made
contact with a longtime family associ-
ate who is an executive of the Bank
of Eastern Oregon. In addition to that
bank fi nancing, Heidi was speaking
with prospective investors in Bend
who were eager to have our pursuit of
ownership succeed.
The auction on July 29 occurred
in the offi ce of the Portland law fi rm
Tonkon Torp. Our group — including
my cousin Kathryn, Heidi, our CFO
Rick Hansen and our lawyers — were
placed in one room while the three-
STEVE
FORRESTER
man team from Adams Publishing
Group was in another. Rhode Island
Suburban Newspapers, the party that
made the initial bid on The Bulletin,
did not show up for the auction. To
honor our family’s ambitions and the
gravity of the moment, Kathryn wore a
Pendleton jacket that had belonged to
my mother, Eleanor.
At 10 a.m. we moved to another con-
ference room — the bidding site. When
the Adams trio entered, we stood to
greet them. Mark Adams, the compa-
ny’s CEO, sat two seats away from me;
Heidi was to my left. In a thrilling auc-
tion that would last 15 minutes, Adams
would be their bidder, Heidi ours.
The bidding requirement was to
raise by minimum increments of
$50,000, beginning at $2.55 million.
After the initial round of bidding drove
the price to $3.05 million, the Adams
group left the room to confer privately.
There was a second conference at the
$3.45 million mark, after which Mark
Adams jumped the bid to $3.6 million.
Heidi hesitated for what seemed to me
20 seconds. But Rick clocked it at 15
seconds. Even though we were below
our ceiling, her hesitation seemed an
eternity. Instead of raising our bid,
Mark Adams graciously congratulated
us on our acquisition.
In taking ownership of The Bulle-
tin, our company is not simply buying
another property. It is taking hold of
a journalistic opportunity that will
become immensely signifi cant to all of
Oregon. With the decline of formerly
infl uential daily newspapers such as
The Register-Guard of Eugene and
others, The Bulletin will become a
beacon in a part of Oregon that is
gaining economic, cultural and political
signifi cance. The Bulletin will become
a heavyweight partner for our East-
ern Oregon newspapers in Umatilla,
Union, Baker, Wallowa and Grant
counties — and for our papers on the
Oregon and Washington coast and the
Capital Press as well.
Our newspaper group fosters a cul-
ture of collaboration. That has allowed
us to punch well above our weight. In
collaboration with the Pamplin Media
Group, we have formed a statehouse
bureau that reverses the decline in
coverage of the Oregon Legislature
and state agencies. In 2006 our papers
collaborated on a series of articles
about climate change. In addition to
pieces that were informed by science,
each newspaper developed cameos of
scientists, naturalists, farmers and
fi shers who spoke about what they
were noticing in their region’s natu-
ral environment. That series won an
award of Special Merit in the national
Grantham Prize competition.
The environment and climate change
are the primary issues of the 21st
century. Our series — 13 years old — is
ripe for an update. And The Bulletin‘s
participation in such a venture would
give a new series even more impact.
Steve Forrester, the former editor and
publisher of The Daily Astorian, is the
president and CEO of EO Media Group.
Contact him at sforrester@eomediagroup.
com.
GUEST EDITORIAL
Editorial from The Albany
Democrat-Herald:
Nearly two months have passed
since the 2019 Legislature wrapped up
its work, but there’s still plenty of con-
fusion surrounding one of the session’s
most signifi cant bills, the measure that
limits how the death penalty can be
applied in Oregon.
The key question is this: Is the bill
retroactive — that is, does it apply to
the 31 inmates who currently are on
death row in Oregon?
One of the bill’s key backers, state
Sen. Floyd Prozanski, a Eugene Demo-
crat, has said a special legislative ses-
sion is required to make it clear the law
doesn’t apply to death penalty cases
sent back for new sentencing hear-
ings as well as new trials. But another
backer, former House Majority Leader
Jennifer Williamson, D-Portland, has
said no additional work is needed on
the bill and that it always was in-
tended to cover situations such as new
sentencing hearings in old cases and
new trials.
A recent opinion by the state Depart-
ment of Justice sided with Williamson’s
interpretation, noting that the new law
applies to death penalty convictions
and sentences that have been over-
turned, in addition to pending cases.
The measure in question, Senate
Bill 1013, narrows the defi nition of
“aggravated murder,” the only crime in
Oregon that can be punished by death.
The death penalty in Oregon now can
only be applied in four types of crimes:
killings motivated by terrorism, mur-
ders of children 14 years or younger,
killings by an incarcerated person
who’s serving a previous aggravated
murder sentence and premeditated
killings of police or corrections offi cers.
Other crimes that used to be
considered aggravated murder, such
as slayings committed during a rape
or robbery, no longer can be punished
with the death penalty.
The bill was carefully constructed
(perhaps too carefully) to ensure that it
didn’t require a vote of the people; such
a vote would be required of a measure
that called for completely doing away
with the death penalty in Oregon.
It’s probably fair to say that many, if
not most, legislators believed that the
bill was not meant to apply retroac-
tively. In that light, the measure didn’t
seem likely to make much difference
for death-row inmates: It’s been more
than two decades since Oregon ex-
ecuted a prisoner and Gov. Kate Brown
is continuing a moratorium on the
death penalty that was instituted by
her predecessor, John Kitzhaber.
But the idea that the bill could be
applied retroactively to some cases
changes that calculation to some ex-
tent: As The Oregonian’s Noelle Crom-
bie reported, it’s not at all unusual
for aggravated-murder convictions or
death penalty sentences to be over-
turned or remanded to a lower court. In
fact, Crombie noted, seven cases have
been reversed in the last 2fi years, and
not one of Oregon’s death row inmates
has exhausted his or her legal chal-
lenges. It would be interesting to see if
legislators approach the bill differently
should it come up again in a special
session or next year’s short session.
Regardless of what happens to
Senate Bill 1013, legislators should
stop sneaking around the issue of the
death penalty and fully confront it by
referring to voters a measure to abolish
capital punishment in Oregon.
Oregonians have a long and tangled
history with the death penalty. Capital
punishment was outlawed by Oregon
voters in 1914 and then reenacted
in 1978. Three years later, the state
Supreme Court ruled that the death
penalty was unconstitutional, a ruling
that paved the way for a 1984 initia-
tive in which voters reaffi rmed capital
punishment.
Since then, the topic rarely has been
revisited in Oregon, and the gubernato-
rial moratoriums have had the effect of
sweeping the debate about capital pun-
ishment under the rug. Meanwhile, the
national conversation about the death
penalty has taken fascinating turns.
It’s been almost four decades since
state voters affi rmed the death penalty.
It’s long past time to bring this conver-
sation to all of Oregon.